Insomnia Diary

Sur Coast diary

Sur Coast diary I stood where the earth turned itself inside out like a sock at the end of the day, mottled rock and grey rock, slate and conglomerate, a place for my feet and a place for my bag, I watched an island vibrate with seals and an island shiver with cormorants, my mind on the Pacific plate, my soul on the North American, I was torn in half with the speed a fingernail grows, I heard the jaws of the earth at work, the mountains rose, the ocean swallowed. I saw my reflection in the eye of a black-tailed deer, we stood five feet apart, it stared at me with the charisma of the dark side of the moon, I told it my name, I collected its breath on my humid tongue, our confusion was the understanding we shared, the astonished seconds before panic, before we remembered it was impossible to touch. I peed against a tree twice as old as the Magna Carta, older than steel-hulled ships, than steel itself, than cities hived with light, than the Black Plague but not the plague of money, than flight but not the waxy confidence of Icarus, peed against the red meat of the trunk, peed against the hegemony of indoor plumbing, peed against the idea that I am flesh, to prove  I am made of steam, to prove I am good as gold. I opened my mouth to the shadow of a condor, swallowed the Pleistocene, swallowed the memory of the first hominids for this black pause in the sky, this shape that flies without wing beats, scavenging is a dream of the clouds, death has earned elegance, in wide spires the ugly head turns, the long feathers engross the air, of this hunger there are  examples, when they’re gone a noun will disappear, a sound will leave our throats, we’d be more attractive parasites if we could fly. I found a house a poet built and a tower, took notes for him, that the makers of heavier tyrannies have added a fence and to the fence a warning that You are required to clean up after your dog, Mr. Jeffers would not want cable I assured the man stringing wires among the eucalyptus, he’d ask why we store our heads in boxes, why our legislatures are concerned with poodles, he’d tell me to go out and lick the Pacific, turn from the beautiful homes into a wind whose fetch began in China, to smell the hands on the other side of the world cleaning carp, cleaning weapons, I’ve come here to shout into the pliant machine of the swell, to grow small, to wake in the night and retune my breath to this black lung.  ...